LINE BREAKS & OTHER VIOLENT CRIMES

If I had an extra $345 to spend (SPOILER ALERT: I DON’T!), I would totally spend it on this color-coded version of The Sound and the Fury. And yet I also agree with HTMLGIANT that

When the implied becomes the explicit, much of the beast is tamed, or at least caged. I personally love the what the fuck is going on feeling when slugging away at a book whose author was either psychotic or genius. I know it’s cliché, perhaps even a myth, but our perception of the author’s psychiatric state informs the value of its literature, which may implicate the inherent pathos of secular western art. It’s like The Maury Povich Show or Jerry Springer: one is simply gladdened to see crazy people on stage. I think of William, in a spare bedroom scratching chapter notes for a novel on a wall named after days of the week he clearly lost track of, and am touched. I have this theory where the more awful a roommate a writer would be, the better the literature. (Kafka totally late on rent; Emily Dickinson never leaving the goddamn the house; Henry James clearing out the fridge at night.) When a handful of dedicated editors distill Faulkner’s modernism into a color key, he almost comes across looking like a fraud who threw his manuscript across the room, picked up the pieces, and called it done. The reader lends the novel intent in exchange for meaning.

All that doesn’t change the fact that this book was my first love and if I have my way I will someday own a library comprised solely of all possible versions of Faulkner books.